Santa Maria della Rotonda

The church now houses the permanent archives on the history of emigration.

Lucca

The church of Santa Maria della Rotonda is located in the northwest part of the Palazzo. It was first documented in 1131, and was included in the sale of the Augusta Fortress in 1322 by Castruccio Castracani, Lord of Lucca. In 1428, it was aggregated to the nearby church of Sant’Alessandro Maggiore. It was the former home of the Tailor’s Company Association, and then of the Misericordia. The current building had been restructured sometime in the late-1700s and early-1800s. This is when the internal vault was frescoed by Ippolito Marracci. In the vault, he created fake architectural elements and a depiction of the Madonna. In 2000, the chapel was restructured for the Jubilee, and since then, has housed the permanent archive collection of Paolo Cresci on the history of emigration.

A bastion-protected medieval city and a blast of comics, culture and colors

Many people born and bred in Tuscany consider Lucca an outlier—it’s not uncommon to hear Florentines mutter “that's not Tuscan”, probably when referring to the bread, which is salted in Lucca and strictly plain elsewhere in Tuscany; or to the Lucchese people's mode of speaking (unique, to say the least); or to the fact that Lucca is the region’s only city-state to have preserved its ...